Josh Isner (Axon President): What Bill Belichick Taught Him About Mental Toughness

You don't learn how to win until you're around winners. And those guys just the amount of intensity and confidence and preparation, those things come through and ultimately that's where I was able to pick up a wealth of knowledge about the game and how to win in golf that really made the difference.

Don, thanks a lot for having me. Big fan and love the concept. So excited to chat a little about sports and leadership and how it intersects with business.

Sure. We're here to win, Don. That's why we're in business. We want to accomplish our mission and the only way we can do that is by winning every day. Winning against our competition, winning on behalf of our customers. We're a very, very competitive group. And ultimately, if we're not trying to win, what are we really doing? So, everything from our identity, we say every year at Axon, our identity is we're a winning team with a lot of swagger that delivers outside societal outcomes. That's what we come to work to do every day. And when we think about sports, what better construct is there in life to figure out how to get a group of people on the same page to win, to achieve a common goal? There are so many parallels between sports and business, but it starts with how are you going to build a team? How are you going to motivate your team? How do you get everybody on the team running in the same direction every day? How do you build a culture where the team communicates well? Those are the things we think about and they're the first principles we start with as we build our company and go out every year and try to win. How do you make sure the swagger is something that they feel, they appreciate, but it doesn't step over the line and suddenly become seen as arrogance? Because sometimes, you and I both know, we're in the world of sports. Swagger's good, confidence is good.

Yeah, I think one of our values, Don, is to expect candor. It's my favorite value because you can't have a good team and a performance culture unless you're really honest and candid with each other. And sometimes that candor is, look, we're a demanding group. We expect a lot out of our team and there's an intensity that comes with that because at the end of the day, our mission is to protect life. We want to save people's lives. That's not something you can do as a lifestyle business. And so there's a lot of intensity and we challenge people every day. And sometimes the way to be candid, to be honest with our team, is remind them how good they are and how much we believe in them. And oftentimes I think there's a balance in leadership between challenging folks and trying to get the best out of them, trying to push them to the point where they feel like, hey, I'm a little uncomfortable right now. I'm being pushed hard. But then we've got to balance that with the idea that look, the reason we're pushing you is because we believe in you, because you make our team better, because without you on the team, our team is not going to perform as well. And so you got to balance those two things. And I think that's a big part of reminding our people what we're looking for, what's important, how to get the best out of them.

Sure. There's a lot of those and I'm very fortunate to be able to learn from somebody who I think is absolutely the best at what they do and has the resume to support that thesis. But there's been a few things. Early on in my role running Axon, I wanted to make sure we established the things that we can remind each other of day to day, and our identity was one of those things. But ultimately there are a couple more. One of which is we talk about the behaviors we're looking for every day at Axon. And when I stand up in front of the company to start kick off the year or company kickoff, one of the things I always spend some time on is this concept of blocking out the noise. That comes directly from Coach. There was a lot of noise about the Patriots from 2000 to 2020. Some of it good, some of it bad, some of it speculative, some of it real. And ultimately having the discipline to say none of that really matters in life, what other people are talking about outside our team is just a waste of energy.

And so what coaching did Belichick give you on that? You know, one thing that he said one time that I thought was very helpful is he's like, 'Hey, those are the moments you've got to be the most mentally tough. Those are the moments that you've got to exhibit your mental toughness.' I asked him, 'What is mental toughness? How would you define that?' And he said, 'It's the ability to focus on your job to help the team win.' Do your job. It's at the moments where it's noisiest, reminding yourself what you have to do to help your team win. I think that's very simple, but very helpful as well. And so it just helps you tune out the narrative. It's like, hey, yeah, this guy thinks that. What's the point of trying to change his mind? Let's just focus on the things I can do to help the team win.

And then maybe the last thing, Don, for Coach, doesn't originally come from Coach, but he's a big Art of War guy, the Sun Tzu book. And that one has been very, very meaningful to us at Axon because, you know, Coach says, how to win football games, you got to do what you're good at the most of the time and you've got to do what you're bad at the least. So, if you're a good offensive team, you better make sure that every play matters and that you are focused on keeping the ball in your hands as much as you can, and that on defense, you're trying to get off the field as quick as you can so you can get your offense the ball back to try to score again. And for us, we have that conversation a lot, especially as our company grows. It's like, what can our company be good at? Can we be the best in the world at this thing? And do we really believe that? And if we do, if we think we can, we do it. Oftentimes, we think, hey, this isn't our power alley. This isn't the thing that differentiates us. We should go focus on a partner or an acquisition or something else that, you know, we're bringing on people that are the best at that if we're not. But I think that very simple concept of, hey, to win, you just got to keep doing what you're best at with the most of the time. That's really been a focusing mechanism for us. And I think, over the years, there were certain truths of the New England Patriots, regardless of the year. It was making sure Tom Brady had the ball in his hands, making sure special teams outplayed the other team's special teams, making sure the defense didn't break, but they bend, and these were the things that were characteristics of all those great Patriots teams. That's what they did well year in and year out. And for us, there's certainly some parallels there.

Tommy Amaker? Tommy. I learned a lot from him. Learned a lot.

Absolutely. And he's, you know, we talked about Coach Belichick. I'd say just being at practice every day and watching how he coached, I learned as much about business from him as anyone else. Especially this concept of the next play. And that originally comes from, as you mentioned, but those are words. Didn't matter if the last play was a good one or a bad one. It's over. All that matters is next play. That's right. And that's been a rallying cry for our team and I find it most useful when things are going well. Right. Everyone convinces themselves how good they are and we don't want that. We want to be focused on what's next, not patting ourselves on the back for what just happened.

Sure thing. Sure thing. I guess the truth is even in college, I wasn't all that good at golf. I was a good junior golfer in Massachusetts and I played in the tournaments at times in college and played against some really good players and really good schools. But for me, I really didn't get good at golf, like better at golf, until I moved to Arizona and I joined a phenomenal club out there called Whisper Rock. Great, Trius owns the club and he makes all the decisions there and he's built something so special that's built on competition and fun and mutual respect and quality. Nobody's better than anyone else at the club and I have a lot of respect for Greg, but that opportunity that he gave me to play golf there opened my eyes to how good you had to be at this game to really compete. And it's the type of club where everybody's a member. Like, you know, John Rahm shows up one day, Max shows up one day, Wyndham Clark, all these exceptional players, JJ Spaun, and these guys will play with you. And when you play with them and see how hard they work on their games, see how they think about the game, that's ultimately when I realized what it was going to take to be really good at this game. And I always had a goal to win something called the Fallon Cup, which was one of the bigger member-guest tournaments in Massachusetts, all best amateurs in Massachusetts playing it. You got to qualify for it, then you play in a bracket until there's a winner. And it was at a course called Walpole, which I was never really, I didn't know how to play the course very well, and I never really competed in the tournament. I always wanted to win it, but then when I get out to Arizona and see how good these guys are and see how they play the game, it really opened my eyes to what I needed to do to win. And so I worked really hard at it. I hit a lot of golf balls. Every weekend I was thinking about winning the Fallon Cup. I was hitting balls for a couple hours. I was chipping and putting and it finally happened. I've won it a couple times now. But it's really, you don't learn how to win until you're around winners. And those guys just the amount of intensity and confidence and preparation, those things come through and ultimately that's where I was able to pick up a wealth of knowledge about the game and how to win in golf that really made the difference.

Yeah, a couple of these guys reminded me that, you know, everybody sees the videos of Tiger Woods hitting all these crazy shots like big hooks or swinging out of his shoes with the driver. They reminded me the most conservative player in the game of golf was Tiger Woods. He was always playing from the fairway. He was always putting himself in a position to hit the best shots in match play. He was always trying to hit first from the fairway to put pressure on the opponent, which meant he wasn't hitting driver a lot. He was laying it up in the fairway so he could hit first. And so the understanding of golf and Coach Belichick says this a lot. It's before you win, you have to learn how not to lose. And that's really in golf, that's a big part of the game. It's like you can't lose the game. You have to keep your ball in play. You have to keep yourself in a position to hit good shots. Paying attention to angles and where you want to miss if you hit a bad shot. Those are the things that the best players do exceptionally well because the dispersion pattern gets very tight. Between good shots and bad shots, it's tighter dispersion. You can recover when you hit a bad shot because you have plenty of green to work with if you miss on the opposite side of the pin. And so these are the things: playing conservative and outthinking your opponents and making sure you're playing from a position of not only strength but tactical advantage. Those are the keys to being the best at golf. And right now we see an incredible example of that in Scottie Scheffler.

That's exactly right. Ted Scott's a good guy to have on the bag for that for sure. Teddy's real.

I consider myself our chief team builder, right? And I view my role as, hey, if Josh is running down the field with the ball, not only is that going to be a very short-lived play, but that's probably not what we're going to do to win as a company. When I'm putting people in position to win, that's the formula that really can work. And so my job is to find the people, find the leaders, empower them, put them in positions where they can win. And ultimately we just made an acquisition of a company called Prepared. And it's led by this guy Michael Chime who's, I think he's about 27 years old. He was a Yale football player and dropped out of Yale to start his company called Prepared.

I looked past that. I looked past that. He's not a Knicks fan like his co-founder Dylan, which is a huge benefit in working with Michael. Dylan, you can't even be around the guy right now after the Knicks won. But these guys were very talented. But, you know, in terms of Michael, this is somebody that I saw as a guy that all the stuff we've been talking about today, he embodies, and that's the kind of leader we want to put on the field. Kid's 27 years old and he's as effective of a leader as anybody we have. And so when we were talking about Prepared as a 911 company and we were looking at a few 911 companies at the time and trying to decide how we wanted to enter this market, the thing that really shined through was Michael as a leader and saying, 'Hey, these guys are early on. They're on a great trajectory, but at the end of the day, this is a guy we want to bet on at our company for a long time.' And so that was the determining factor. And it's a guy I think we'll hear a lot from in the future as part of our team.

Yeah, so first off, playing varsity basketball is a generous way to describe it. I could shoot the ball. They used to call me the microwave because I'd come in and I'd shoot like five times like Vinnie Johnson in the 80s.

That's where the analogy kind of diverged from my talents. And so I was more, I was always interested in coaching even at that age. So, I played JV basketball and then I kind of managed the varsity team and I would just help and I would sit there and learn. And Coach Martellini was really the first coach that I said, 'Hey, I can learn a lot from this guy.' And there were a few things that he did that I still think about today. The first is every practice ended with three words. You could say 'jump to ball' or you could say 'let's win tomorrow' or whatever the three words you wanted. But he'd go around the whole team, all the managers, everyone. There's three words. We have three words at Axon. They're sharp, adaptable, and unstoppable. Those are the three things we expect all of our employees to embody as part of our team. And that comes from the three words exercise that Coach used to run at the end of practice. And he would make everybody say those three words, but not in unison. Three words you wanted. Any three words you wanted. So everybody every day said any three words they wanted. Sometimes they were jokes, sometimes they were about a big game coming up, but we've taken that concept and said, 'Hey, these are three words we all want to align around as a company.' And then secondly, he was the first coach that I really realized he coached players really, really hard. He pushed them, he challenged them, he expected a lot out of them. But before any of that, he built a foundation of trust and really love with his players. It was clear the reason he was coaching you this hard is because he cared about you. And I think at times that gets lost in the shuffle a little bit in coaching where, you know, when you establish trust, when you establish the idea that, hey, I'm going to coach you hard because I want you to be the best you can be and I want to see that out of you and you'll take this and your life will be better as a result of these lessons. When you establish that kind of foundation with your players, then you have the license to push them and to coach them. And if you don't do that, you never really have earned that license and you probably get less out of them. And so that was something that was very much apparent with Coach Martellini and something that's true of any kind of environment where you're coaching somebody.

Sure. I'm just writing down that quote. I love that quote. For us, I think, you know, when I was an executive early in my career, I was essentially the chief revenue officer of the company maybe in 2016 or 2017 and that was still pretty early for me, maybe I was 27 or 28 years old at that point. And so I'm like, okay, we're in the big leagues now. I can walk into this meeting, I represent the sales team, and I'm going to tell everybody exactly what we need to make the sales team successful here. No filters, no positioning, no sugar coating. Just like, hey, we're not getting enough out of recruiting. We need better salespeople. We need a better pipeline of salespeople so that when we interview them, these are people we want to bring on our team. Marketing, you've been useless to us. You haven't done much to help us. And so I get in and we do a few of these meetings and maybe the language wasn't as strong as 'marketing being useless.' It was more like, hey, we're just not getting what we need. But at the end of the day, that didn't go very well. And I was, in my mind, I'm like, 'Hey, these are all executives of a public company. They've been through a lot in their lives and in their careers. They'll take this message.' They didn't like that message. And it took a lot, and Luke, who was a mentor of mine, Luke Larson, he was the president of Axon before I was, and a good friend of mine, took me aside and he said exactly what you just said. It's not what you say, it's what they hear. And what they're hearing right now is you're not a nice guy. You're pushing too hard here and you're demotivating people, not motivating them. And so that was a very meaningful lesson for me because at the end of the day, I try one thing I try to do at work is I don't try to coach any two people the same way. I try to figure out, hey, how should I talk to this person to get the most out of them? What message is going to resonate with them? Is this a person that I could push to the limit and they'll respond, or is this a person that is going to shut down if I try to do that? And so all of those things, there are certainly people that I could talk to that way and they know it was coming from a place of good intent and a place of, hey, I just want the team to be better, and they'd talk to me like that about what our sales people needed to be better at. But at the end of the day, that's not for everyone and it's probably not for most people. And so when you're running a big team and a big company, it's about figuring out, hey, what is this person going to respond to and what's going to motivate them? And that was a very, very valuable lesson.

That's right. That's right.

Yeah, this is one I had to learn because when I studied Coach Belichick, there was one game, 28-3 game in the Super Bowl against the Falcons, and there's this famous story about him just walking in the locker room at halftime and saying, 'Guys, here's what we have to do to win, and if we do these things, we'll get back in the game and we'll win.' That works in sports clearly. It does not work as well in business because what happens in business is, and it's funny, I went to this, I guess they call it Singularity University. It's a class you can take about thinking about the future and being a futurist and understanding what brings you into the future. And there was this guy there named Kyle Nell and he built essentially Lowe's first augmented reality program for their stores. And he said, 'Look,' he started every presentation with, 'I'm going to tell you a story.' And he explained after saying that that what happens when you tell a story is there's a chemical reaction in your brain that makes you perk up and listen and you're invested in the story now. You're not just being told what to do. You're actually in it. And so the idea of when you're in front of a big group of people trying to capture their attention and imagination, it's a story. It's getting them invested in the story that's going to make the lesson land. It's the thing that, in Coach Wooden's words, that's when you know they've learned because you're communicating in a way that they're invested in.

And so, one story that I've told recently, our company has had a phenomenal run and everyone's performed really well here and I'm really proud of our team. But one thing we talk about a lot is we want to be Secretariat at the Belmont. And we tell the story of Secretariat, how this was a horse who was a closer. He would come from behind at the end of races down the stretch and catch up and blow by his competition. But in the Belmont, his biggest competitor, Sham, their strategy was to try to wear him out early. So to get him out in front and try to burn him out and not let him jog from behind and then close. And instead, what happened is they pushed Secretariat, pushed Secretariat, pushed Secretariat, and then Sham was the one who got worn out. And Secretariat wins by this massive margin. We show the picture of he's the only horse in the frame at the wire at the Belmont. And that's who we want to be as a company. We want people to push us and then we want that to be the next bit of motivation to break away from the pack and to win. And when you're the market leader, you're going one of two directions. You're either falling back into the pack or you're extending your lead. And we want to be the type of company that extends our lead. And so, couldn't find a better embodiment of that than Secretariat.

100%. 100%.

Sure thing. I've been very lucky in my life and that was a tough thing that happened when my dad passed away when I was a sophomore in high school. And you learn a lot from that. You learn how to respond to adversity and you kind of learn about yourself during moments like that. But there have been a lot of people in my life that have stood by me. And I'm lucky to have a mom like I do who was a master swimmer and who woke up at 4:00 a.m. every morning to swim 2 miles in the morning. And she had a very bad kidney disease and was on dialysis for a couple years and she'd still find a way to swim. And she, thankfully, got a kidney from one of my uncles and is doing well now. But she's really been the person that taught me about resilience and mental toughness and so forth. And so I want to be fair to my mom and say that that's really where a lot of that came from early on. But it's a little different when you get into a company and you try to learn how to succeed in a corporate environment. And that's really where Luke came in. Luke came into Axon essentially a year before I did. And he was an officer in the Marine Corps. And while we talk about sports a lot as a construct for leadership and teamwork, the other one that is undeniable is the US military. And anybody who spends time in our armed services, certainly we have a ton of respect for those individuals and a ton of gratitude, but those are individuals as well that learned how to be coached, learned how to be on a team, learned how to make everything work under the highest of stress and the most dire of circumstances.

And so Luke was that. He was an officer in the Marine Corps. He was a decorated officer. He certainly had everybody's respect at work. But he was also a young guy. He was older than me but only by a few years. And he was the perfect person in that part of my life to really teach me like, hey, this is what people expect out of you and this is how you perform in this environment and these are the things that really matter and how you show up for work every day and how you present yourself matters and how you talk to people matters. He's the person who told me it's not what you say, it's what they hear. Those were all lessons that I was very thankful to have Luke in my life. And it would have been very easy for Luke to say, 'Hey, here's a guy who's kind of my age. This guy's kind of my competition at this company.' Right? And instead he did the exact opposite and took me under his wing. And I was always happy to work for Luke because of that.

For sure. And it's the type of mentorship that I think works at Axon. I kind of always laugh at this idea where it's like you come to work and you're assigned a mentor on day one. I still have never seen that actually work in reality. Mentorship works when someone seeks you out or you seek someone out and you have a relationship with them and it just happens naturally. And that's a great example of it with Luke's mentorship. It certainly happened very naturally and it didn't happen all at once. There were just moments along the way that made a big difference in my life and career and I'm forever thankful for Luke.

I think it's the same thing that's driven me my whole life, which is I just want to be the best. I want to win every single day and I just wake up and whatever the task is at hand, I want to excel at it. I don't understand really what life is about unless you just want to push yourself to be the best every day. Like what are we doing if we're not doing that? And so for me, it's funny, I actually want it more as I get older. And as our company has accomplished a lot and as our team has accomplished a lot, I want it more. And so every day it's easy now to get up and say, 'Hey, what do we have to do? Where do we want to go as a company? Where do we want to win?' It's easy to get up and go to work every day when that's the mindset. And it's even easier when you show up and you look around and you see people who believe that and want that just as bad as you do. When you have 6,000 rapidly competitive animals that show up to work every day, that's the environment that drives this. And when we've created that environment, it sustains. It's really easy to show up and be a part of that team. So, no matter what we're doing, if it's work, I run a horse racing stable now outside of work and I want to win the Kentucky Derby so badly, every day, I just want to win. And it takes a team to do that in all cases. And when you start building that team and start pursuing the goal, it's very fulfilling when it starts to happen.

Everybody's safer. Everybody's safer. If our first responders are safer, that means they have less stress when they show up at these really intense scenarios and that leads to safer outcomes on the other side of those scenarios as well. So, absolutely, when our team wins, it's an impact on society in a really positive way. So, I appreciate you saying that, Don.

Appreciate it, Don. This was a lot of fun and by far the most fun I've had doing an interview. So, thank you very much and I'd love to keep in touch and congratulations on all your success as well.